The brake pedal on my US market 2018 Leaf feels really “spongey” and soft when fully depressed. It doesn’t seem to affect the braking. But compared to every other car I’ve owned, it never feels solid. If I’m sitting at a light with my foot on the brake, I can push it in and out a good inch of squishy play.

I usually drive in E-pedal mode so I’ve only just started to notice this. But it kind of makes me nervous. Maybe it’s because the last car was a BMW 3 which had superb brakes. Or maybe I don’t know how regen brakes are supposed to feel.

mikeyagi wrote:The brake pedal on my US market 2018 Leaf feels really “spongey” and soft when fully depressed. It doesn’t seem to affect the braking. But compared to every other car I’ve owned, it never feels solid. If I’m sitting at a light with my foot on the brake, I can push it in and out a good inch of squishy play.

I usually drive in E-pedal mode so I’ve only just started to notice this. But it kind of makes me nervous. Maybe it’s because the last car was a BMW 3 which had superb brakes. Or maybe I don’t know how regen brakes are supposed to feel.

Does anyone else have this experience?

Hard to tell from your description if it's truly "squishy" or just soft/gentle? Other cars might feel more grabby, but I've always considered the leaf brakes as more progressive (like Honda's Odyssey). Press lightly for slight braking, and deeper for stronger braking. Are you getting that?

Maybe you should carry out some successive hard brake tests just to check for brake fade (not enough vacuum pressure from your brake booster)?

If the brake pads are not fully seated against the rotors, the pedal will feel soft/spongy. In my case, both 2011 and 2015 took quite a while for the ceramic pads to wear in to get full contact against the rotors. The pedal (in each case) was much firmer after the pads were fully seated.

The problem seems to be related to e-pedal mode only, and pertaining to brake blending. This is by far the worst EV / PHEV that I have ever driven in that regard, and that's been many.

The problem is that the brake pedal position is mapped to an overall braking force. On other words, if you completely lift your foot off the gas in e-pedal, you are already decelerating (quite heavily at that), and now you gently press the brake, which tells the computer that you want to gently decelerate - thus commanding a decrease in overall braking power. Similarly, if you're on the brake and say are doing a California Stop, i.e. easing off the brake before coming to a complete stop, you will feel that the car actually brakes more as you ease off the brake until you get your foot on the gas.

I work in the EV industry so I find this lapse of testing to be simply baffling, as any Ford/Mercedes/Tesla/VW/Chrysler/BMW/Audi EV/PHEV that I've ever driven had completely smooth brake blending (with regen mode), but somehow perplexingly the company that's been at it the longest has such a bug (that probably will never be fixed, at least for existing cars). Baffling. Causes a bad experience for passengers because there's simply no way to do a smooth roll-stop, and is confusing for the driver because one and the same brake position has different retardation as result.

Although I liked e-pedal idea, it has a few quirks that make it look like it has glitches in accelerator to brake pedal and reverse transitions. The human-to-vehicle interface in this mode is a bit awkward during those transitions. Perhaps easily accessible strong regen momentary button is all that was needed (like in Bolt).

mikeyagi wrote:The brake pedal on my US market 2018 Leaf feels really “spongey” and soft when fully depressed. It doesn’t seem to affect the braking. But compared to every other car I’ve owned, it never feels solid. If I’m sitting at a light with my foot on the brake, I can push it in and out a good inch of squishy play.

I usually drive in E-pedal mode so I’ve only just started to notice this. But it kind of makes me nervous. Maybe it’s because the last car was a BMW 3 which had superb brakes. Or maybe I don’t know how regen brakes are supposed to feel.

Does anyone else have this experience?

Sounds like my 2012 and 2015. One the pedal reaches a certain maximum pressure, you can just "push through" to the floor without any further increase. I just figured it must be some kind of compensating valves related to the ABS. I've always found the braking on these cars to be quite good with the exception of some low-speed grabby-ness that arises periodically and can be removed by "calibrating" the system (hold pedal all the way to the floor while stopped, and hold for at least 30 seconds.